In an email promotion, they start the document with this finding from the research: "56% of vendors view themselves as being extremely customer-centric, but only 12% of customers agree. Despite an increased focus on customer engagement, most B2B technology companies continue to fall short of meeting customer expectations and commitments."

What a gap!

The various business gaps are all too often taken for granted.

There is a gap between sales and marketing. This shows up as all those leads generated by marketing have a checked pattern of concise follow up.

In the trade show world, there is a statistic that 80% of trade shows leads are never followed up.

Many marketing departments just waste their precious dollars with little or no results demonstrated.

Why? The biggest reason is the lack of accountability within an organization.

Some one who is at the top of the organization should be asking the tough questions.

Your department - marketing - spent so much on these lead generation activities - what is the return on that investment?

If your management is not asking the questions, possibly you can start creating the metrics to show them what happen (the good, the bad and the ugly) on the last marketing campaign.

It is OK to test some ideas to see if they work.

Maybe you want to get into a new market space, so you try a few things to see if it generated any interest.

Afterwards you: Analyze - Learn - Improve

It is a constant process of reviewing the results to see if they were good enough and then what can you do that would improve the next campaign.

Duct Tape Marketing - John Jantsch in his blog posting on December 7, 2006 - has said so well what should take place:

"The gap between generating a high quality, ideal lead and that lead becoming a client requires harmony between sales and marketing and the joint development of an ideal client profile, core marketing message based on customer input, and the education based tools required to nurture a lead along an evolving, logical path to becoming a converted lead or client.

There is no money in us and them, sales and marketing. Get the sales folks, the marketing folks and a handful of ideal clients in a room for a day and figure out what really makes each one tick."

This is the best first step to fix the gap.

WOW - what a novel idea - listening to the customer.